The proliferation and ever-increasing sophistication of malware in its various forms—viruses, worms, advanced persistent threat (APT), distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack or any other code or traffic that represents an actual or potential security threat—has traditionally been countered by software-based detection schemes that favor tractability over execution speed. As network data rates escalate, however, the malware detection bottleneck is becoming increasingly problematic, constraining network performance particularly in high-throughput enterprise networks.